OTHER MAIN-TRAVELLED ROADS HAMLIN GARLAND SUNSET EDITION
HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON |
COPYRIGHT, 1892, 1899, 1910, BY HAMLIN GARLAND
PRAIRIE FOLKS
PIONEERS.
They rise to mastery of wind and snow;
They go like soldiers grimly into strife,
To colonize the plain; they plow and sow,
And fertilize the sod with their own life
As did the Indian and the buffalo.
SETTLERS.
Above them soars a dazzling sky,
In winter blue and clear as steel,
In summer like an Arctic sea
Wherein vast icebergs drift and reel
And melt like sudden sorcery.
Beneath them plains stretch far and fair,
Rich with sunlight and with rain;
Vast harvests ripen with their care
And fill with overplus of grain
Their square, great bins.
Yet still they strive! I see them rise
At dawn-light, going forth to toil:
The same salt sweat has filled my eyes,
My feet have trod the self-same soil
Behind the snarling plough.
PREFACE
Nearly all the stories in this volume were written at the same time andunder the same impulse as those which compose its companion volume,Main-Travelled Roads—and the entire series was the result of asummer-vacation visit to my old home in Iowa, to my father's farm inDakota, and, last of all, to my birthplace in Wisconsin. This happenedin 1887. I was living at the time in Boston, and had not seen the Westfor several years, and my return to the scenes of my boyhood started meupon a series of stories delineative of farm and village life as I knewit and had lived it. I wrote busily during the two years that followed,and in this revised definitive edition of Main-Travelled Roads and itscompan